Australian Nathan Haas is in his neo-pro season with Garmin-Barracuda. The Brisbane native had an outstanding late-2011 season with wins at the Herald SunTour and Japan Cup. At the Tour of California, he’s helping the team’s general-classification riders on the climbs and looking after sprinter Heinrich Haussler for the early stages.

Haas spoke with Bicycling about Stage 2, from San Francisco to Santa Cruz County.

Bicycling: How did today go for you?

Nathan Haas: Today we hit another goal. The GC boys were up there and we started to see a few little cracks in some of the other teams’ GC guys, so it’s a nice seam to see open.

Best of all, Heinrich’s back on the podium. It’s hard to beat Sagan at this; it’s his bread and butter, but it’s really encouraging to see Heino’s confidence go up. He’s got a lot of goals in this race. He’s got Olympic selection potentially, which could be aided by this and then there’s potentially going to the Tour de France, and he’s going to the Tour de Suisse, and so he’s bringing some confidence into those races. It’s nice to see it’s coming together for him.

Bicycling: What do you need to do in order to put Heino in front of Sagan?

Haas: To get Heino a win we need to keep doing exactly what we’re doing now. Unfortunately, I haven’t been at the finish with Heino yet.

Yesterday, I was driving back for 20km to get Heino back into contact, which put him in and he got second, but that put me out of the leadout. And then today I got told to ride the hill so I wasn’t going to see the finish. I’m a pretty fast finisher myself and I would really like to bomb Heino through one of the last corners and give it all and start it front of Sagan.

Bicycling: You put in a very hard effort on the Empire Grade climb, then backed off on Bear Creek. Why?

Haas: We rode on the climb for a lot of reasons, actually. Our GC guys like Tommy D [Tom Danielson] and Andrew [Talansky], they’re not going to crack when guys like Tom Petersen and myself start riding on the climb, so what it does is actually make it smoother for them so they’re not brake-checking in the corners, and it helps keeps them out of trouble.

Also, we did it for the descent, which was quite hairy. We were pretty tentative on that, to be careful there.

But it was more that the guys started to see some cracks in other teams. It’s all small cards in the game of poker that is the race, but a few little tells is good to see. I don’t want to read too much into it. Guys have good days and bad days. But we’ve seen some encouraging signs from how strong the boys are going.